Every day I get to comb through The Baby’s hair, which looks like this when it’s brushed:
… and like a matted mop of yarn when it’s not. Then there’s The Boy, who has hair that stands straight up, rudely disregarding the laws of gravity and so needs his hair gelled down and brushed into reasonable shape before school. The Girl is on her own with her hair, but tends to get some maternal bossing when it comes to keeping her bangs out of her face. I once read that medieval mothers – the good kind – spent at least an hour a day delousing their children’s hair and I thought "OH THOSE POOR WOMEN" and now I spend at least an hour a day with a bottle of detangler in my hand, chasing some ungrateful kid down. Life is funny even when it is sad.
My husband came home last night with a clutch of lilies for me, and The Girl, seeing them in their vase, decided that we needed to have a tablecloth and candles supper with it and so we did, my husband making pasta with sun-dried tomato sauce and red peppers and then I decided to make a chocolate cake but we were out of butter. So my husband tucked the kids in and headed over to the convenience store and the chocolate cake – this one – came out of the oven at nine o’clock, at which point a little blond person peered around the stair railing, EXTREMELY eager for a piece of chocolate cake.
Whenever I’m stressed out, I bake. There’s probably better ways to deal with life but I’ve not found them, and there’s something about the predictable combination of butter and chocolate, sifting together flour and sugar, something that helps. I like to roll my sleeves up, it turns out, like to make something sweet to mark the things that happen in this life.
Note the tablecloth.
And that’s how I spent last night – sitting in a rocking chair across from my daughter in a rocking chair, eating chocolate cake warm from the oven while outside in the dark, the snow was melting and crocuses were rising from the ground, ready to greet me with the morning.